Yes, greed is human nature, just like lust etc. We value when people suppress such feelings, but we know everyone has them.
What do you think has kept life procreating on this planet in the face of overwhelming hardship? Lust.
I think it’s one-eye-blind to demonize greed, lust, or any other part of human nature. Those drives are inseparable from us being here in our current state, living reasonably well, conversing over the internet on phones and computers.
Restraint and being satisfied with what you already have are the keys to stability.
Life is not overwhelming hardship my friend. It is bliss. At the end is the tiger eating your insides saying what bliss is your life, please become part of me. With words we deceive ourselves, convinced that we are separate from the living world we came out of.
A great deal of what has driven civilization forward are the people who are driven by curiosity. People like Archimedes, Plato, Newton, Einstein. Not to mention the millions of curious nameless folks who improved the boat, the spear, the wheel, the book. Folks like RMS without whom I doubt we'd have anything like the current open source ecosystem including Linux. These tend to be people who are not only curious, but whose sense of greed is lower than the average.
Without these folks, it's not clear to me that humanity ratchets forward in progress. If you just have greed and lust, the steady state would be something like power politics of states warring against each other with swords for thousands of years. History has gotten stuck in those states many times, and when we finally break out it's typically the curiosity-driven folks who give the greed-driven folks a reason to invest their money in something other than raising an army for yet another war of honor.
I wasn’t saying greed is the only driver.
Edit: I’d also add, I think it’s a false romanticism to think that people like Einstein and other great thinkers and creators were not without the lower drives like greed and lust. If you think about all of the stages of their lives, and all of the actions and endeavors that led to them advancing their fields, greed and lust would have been interleaved as drivers of many of those actions. Maybe one year Einstein just had a bigger fire lit under his feet because he was trying to impress a girl. Or he worked harder one year because he needed the money.
Then you have people like Edison who were certainly motivated by greed and the lust for power. You have the industrialists like Carnegie who built the railroads. Then you have all of the workers across generations who did all of the work… how much of that work was driven by the “selfish and intense” desire for money?
With respect to lust, I didn't mention it because it was orthogonal, but my understanding is that they're about evenly divided into groups with higher than average lust and lower than average. Paul Erdos is a famous name rumored to be in the latter category.
I think the part you're missing is all the brilliant ideas from brilliant people we missed out on over that 2,000+ year from people we never heard of due to science and art being funded only haphazardly by random wealthy patrons.
For almost all of history it was simply not an option to make a living simply by writing or researching. That's still the case in much of the world.
But once we started to systematize it properly, and governments recognized that technology was a strategic necessity, bam, within a century or two we went from playing with primitive batteries, to nuclear fission, the internet, and now AI.
Somebody was paying for Stallman to sit in an MIT lab and write a free compiler. Maybe we don't talk enough about who or why, or how to replicate that kind of success.
if you looked at great inventors say like Nobel, who amassed a fortune based on research and innovation - would you characterize him driven by greed ?
Why ? Is he any different from say Philo Farnsworth, or Louis Pasteur who never became wealthy ? Were they not driven by the same drive as Nobel ?
Is the drive to succeed different for these sets of people?
Truth is in the eye of the beholder
People are very bad at reasoning about motives of others. Faulty syllogism goes: Nobel invented dynamite. He became wealthy. Therefore, he must have been driven by desire for wealth. Same goes for Pasteur, of course. Maybe he was driven by desire for wealth, but couldn't succeed. My Bayesian senses tell me that Pasteur not being driven by greed is more likely, but I digress.
Leaving individuals aside, I believe that a system that doesn't reward greed is a better system. When a system rewards greed, anti-social behavior becomes prevalent, because it's easier to eat others' pie rather than making a bigger cake. In a system that doesn't reward greed, I believe that curious people will make the cake bigger for the sake of it.
I think -but i'm not certain!- that we have english words for those that "eat others' pie rather" vs "making a bigger cake". I think this is greed, and driven, respectively.
But as you say, we are extremely bad at ascertaining motives of others. So either we get lazy and reduce others to bring them to our level, or we are naturally suspicious and do so anyway.
I'd love to know more of a system that doesn't reward greed. We have laws in place to stop outright theft, but at least in countries like USA and Switzerland, laws do an extremely poor job at making certain politicians that come into politics dirt-poor, stay poor, while in office and even afterwards. That to me is exactly one aspect of the system that must change.
Compare, for example, the engineering-focused Roman empire with the idea-focused Greeks.
> governments recognized that technology was a strategic necessity, bam, within a century or two we went from playing with primitive batteries, to nuclear fission, the internet, and now AI.
Governments have recognized this since at least the time of Archimedes, though. A lot of well-known mathematicians worked on things like canons, mines, railroad networks etc. So I think something else is needed to explain the explosion you're talking about other than governments recognizing the strategic importance of technology. Probably computers (and networks of computers) together with the figuring out of quantum mechanics played major roles.
But I don't work at AI or earn that kind of money, so who knows.
but you're not, presumably. And when you _do_ have that sort of salary, your circle of friends and priorities will also change along with it. At least, for the average person who also makes your claim.
I mean, objectively that's what happens to 95% of people in that situation. Hedonic adaptation is a bitch.
There's a very small positive reward from seeing the number go up, certainly not intense.
* Senior iOS, been doing iOS since the first iPod with retina display, Berlin, details on my website
“intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food.” (Oxford via Google)
Who doesn’t feel “intense and selfish desire” for money? Who doesn’t feel that going into a performance review?
It’s human nature to feel this feeling, if that’s what we want to call “greed”.